Accused SS guard Demjanjuk refuses final say in court; verdict due

John Demjanjuk, the 91-year-old accused of being an accessory to 27,900 murders in a Nazi death camp, declined an invitation to address a final word to the court before judgement is pronounced Thursday in Munich, DPA reported.

Relations of Holocaust victims had pleaded with Demjanjuk last month to end his long silence about what he did in Nazi Germany after he was taken prisoner as a young Red Army soldier. Prosecutors say he became an SS guard at a series of concentration camps.

His lawyer has rejected all the charges at a trial lasting a year and a half. Presiding judge Ralph Alt asked Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk if he had anything to say before judges retire to decide a verdict.

"No," said Demjanjuk curtly.

Alt said the court would resume at 12.30 pm (1030 GMT) to hand down the verdict.

The indictment says Demjanjuk served for several months of 1943 as a guard at Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. They calculate 27,900 Jews were killed in that period in the Sobibor gas chambers.

They said the simple fact that Demjanjuk did not desert proved his guilt.

Relations of Holocaust victims attended the trial as civil co-prosecutors, a status allowing them to speak up in support of the public prosecutor and question witnesses.

The co-prosecutors, mainly resident in the Netherlands or the United States, have told the court the trial is a last chance to investigate the role of SS auxiliaries in the Nazi killing system.

Some had tears in their eyes. Others angrily demanded a conviction. All said they just wanted justice, not revenge.

"John Demjanjuk, we were expecting you to apologize here in court to the dead and their families," said one man, 74, last month. As ever, Demjanjuk showed no sign of even listening, lying on a mobile bed close to the bench, his eyes concealed by dark glasses.

The trial, expected to be one of the last in history for Second World War crimes, has been hampered by a lack of eyewitness evidence. Demjanjuk's shaky health has also held it up at times, with hearings limited to three hours daily.

Under presiding judge Alt, the court has reviewed the history of Sobibor and its guards, ploughing through masses of old documents, questioning historians and other experts and hearing elderly witnesses.

One former Sobibor inmate told the court he could not even remember what his own mother and father looked like, so it was hardly to be expected to could recognize one of the guards after almost 70 years.

With no one alive who saw Demjanjuk at the camp, the state case unveiled at the start of the trial on November 30, 2009 has turned largely on German personnel records that name Demjanjuk.

A statement is also on the records from a Ukrainian, now long dead, who said he was Demjanjuk's fellow guard.

"His guilt arises from his voluntary assistance at the murder of Jews," said prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz, summing up his case against Demjanjuk, a former Ohio car-industry worker, and calling for him to be jailed for six years.

"That guilt is so great that even at his age, more than six decades later, he must be punished."

Document specialists told the court that an identity record with the number 1393 and Demjanjuk's photo on it was genuine. The defence argued it was an old forgery by the Soviet KGB intelligence service.

Demjanjuk's lawyer, Ulrich Busch, contended in his summing up that his client was never at Sobibor, and even if he had been, this did not prove he took part in the actual killing of prisoners in its gas chambers.

Since his expulsion from the United States in May 2009, Demjanjuk has made only one other brief public verbal statement, telling TV reporters, "I'm not Hitler," as he was pushed into court in a wheelchair.